Mr. Fothergill Evidently Had Much Knowledge
And Experience Of The Fernan Vaz District And Its Natives.
He had,
I should say, overdone his experiences with the natives, as far as
personal comfort and pleasure at the time went, having been nearly
killed and considerably chivied by them.
Now I do not wish a man,
however much I may deplore his total lack of local knowledge, to go
so far as this. Mr. Fothergill gave his accounts of these incidents
calmly, and in an undecorated way that gave them a power and
convincingness verging on being unpleasant, although useful, to a
person who was going into the district where they had occurred, for
one felt there was no mortal reason why one should not personally
get involved in similar affairs. And I must here acknowledge the
great subsequent service Mr. Fothergill's wonderfully accurate
descriptions of the peculiar characteristics of the Ogowe forests
were to me when I subsequently came to deal with these forests on my
own account, as every district of forest has peculiar
characteristics of its own which you require to know. I should like
here to speak of West Coast dangers because I fear you may think
that I am careless of, or do not believe in them, neither of which
is the case. The more you know of the West Coast of Africa, the
more you realise its dangers. For example, on your first voyage out
you hardly believe the stories of fever told by the old Coasters.
That is because you do not then understand the type of man who is
telling them, a man who goes to his death with a joke in his teeth.
But a short experience of your own, particularly if you happen on a
place having one of its periodic epidemics, soon demonstrates that
the underlying horror of the thing is there, a rotting corpse which
the old Coaster has dusted over with jokes to cover it so that it
hardly shows at a distance, but which, when you come yourself to
live alongside, you soon become cognisant of. Many men, when they
have got ashore and settled, realise this, and let the horror get a
grip on them; a state briefly and locally described as funk, and a
state that usually ends fatally; and you can hardly blame them.
Why, I know of a case myself. A young man who had never been
outside an English country town before in his life, from family
reverses had to take a situation as book-keeper down in the Bights.
The factory he was going to was in an isolated out-of-the-way place
and not in a settlement, and when the ship called off it, he was put
ashore in one of the ship's boats with his belongings, and a case or
so of goods. There were only the firm's beach-boys down at the
surf, and as the steamer was in a hurry the officer from the ship
did not go up to the factory with him, but said good-bye and left
him alone with a set of naked savages as he thought, but really of
good kindly Kru boys on the beach. He could not understand what
they said, nor they what he said, and so he walked up to the house
and on to the verandah and tried to find the Agent he had come out
to serve under. He looked into the open-ended dining-room and shyly
round the verandah, and then sat down and waited for some one to
turn up. Sundry natives turned up, and said a good deal, but no one
white or comprehensible, so in desperation he made another and a
bolder tour completely round the verandah and noticed a most
peculiar noise in one of the rooms and an infinity of flies going
into the venetian shuttered window. Plucking up courage he went in
and found what was left of the white Agent, a considerable quantity
of rats, and most of the flies in West Africa. He then presumably
had fever, and he was taken off, a fortnight afterwards, by a French
boat, to whom the natives signalled, and he is not coming down the
Coast again. Some men would have died right out from a shock like
this.
But most of the new-comers do not get a shock of this order. They
either die themselves or get more gradually accustomed to this sort
of thing, when they come to regard death and fever as soldiers, who
on a battle-field sit down, and laugh and talk round a camp fire
after a day's hard battle, in which they have seen their friends and
companions falling round them; all the time knowing that to-morrow
the battle comes again and that to-morrow night they themselves may
never see.
It is not hard-hearted callousness, it is only their way. Michael
Scott put this well in Tom Cringle's Log, in his account of the
yellow fever during the war in the West Indies. Fever, though the
chief danger, particularly to people who go out to settlements, is
not the only one; but as the other dangers, except perhaps domestic
poisoning, are incidental to pottering about in the forests, or on
the rivers, among the unsophisticated tribes, I will not dwell on
them. They can all be avoided by any one with common sense, by
keeping well out of the districts in which they occur; and so I warn
the general reader that if he goes out to West Africa, it is not
because I said the place was safe, or its dangers overrated. The
cemeteries of the West Coast are full of the victims of those people
who have said that Coast fever is "Cork fever," and a man's own
fault, which it is not; and that natives will never attack you
unless you attack them: which they will - on occasions.
My main aim in going to Congo Francais was to get up above the tide
line of the Ogowe River and there collect fishes; for my object on
this voyage was to collect fish from a river north of the Congo.
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